Friday, August 09, 2013

The EU is legitimising mass dispossession

Even if Israel were to agree that the
Jewish settlements stigmatized by the EU are illegal under international
law, the proportion 'built on Arab land' in the West Bank
represents a tiny fraction of the Jewish-owned land abandoned or seized
as a matter of deliberate policy in Arab countries, Lyn Julius writes on the Harif blog in the Jerusalem Post, Clash of Cultures.

Cairo's Tahrir Square is once more in the news: revolution and
counter-revolution, protest and put-down. But some issues never capture
the headlines: for instance, did you know that at least 13 villas and
public buildings around the square (including the present Swiss,
German, Canadian, Russian, US, Korean, Bahraini and Algerian embassies)
were once the residences of wealthy Jews - properties seized by the
Egyptian state?

Together with humbler properties owned by Egypt's 80,000-strong
Jewish community - itself now on the verge of extinction - these grand
residences stand as silent witnesses to mass dispossession. The Jewish
owners never received compensation and were summarily expelled in the
1950s.

A feature about the Tahrir Square embassies appeared in the Hebrew press
on the day that, in order to force Israel to make concessions for
peace, the EU announced it was banning co-operation with Israeli
institutions that operate beyond the 'pre-1967 borders' – the West Bank,
East Jerusalem and the Golan Heights. The EU regards these territories
as ‘Arab land’.

With its anti-settlement policy, the EU is sending a clear signal
that it is acceptable for the Arab states, goaded by the Palestinian
leadership, to 'ethnically cleanse' the Jewish population of the
so-called Palestinian territories, the Middle East and North Africa,
but that Jews living a few meters beyond the 1948 armistice lines are
obstacles to peace.

The Jewish settlement of Ofra (Wikipedia)

The idea that the territories beyond the Green Line should be
Jew-free received a ringing endorsement from Palestinian Prime Minister
Mahmoud Abbas just as US secretary of state John Kerry sat Israelis and
Palestinians down to peace talks in Washington DC. Not a single Israeli
would be allowed in a Palestinian state, Abbas announced.

Like the Palestinians, the EU assumes that the West Bank, East
Jerusalem and the Golan Heights are ‘Arab land.’ But nothing is ever
that simple in the Middle East. Land ownership is a tangled web,
although that's a point not often made by the Israeli government.

The Golan Heights are almost universally considered 'Syrian' territory and yet the Jewish National Fund lays claim to 73,974 dunams in southern Syria. The earliest purchase was made in the 1880s.

Similarly, land ownership in Jerusalem and the 'West Bank' is far
more complex than the EU thinks. The 'Jewish settlements' north of
Jerusalem, Atarot and Neve Yaakov, were evacuated in 1948. Mount Scopus -
technically in 'Arab' East Jerusalem - remained a Jewish enclave in
Jordanian-controlled territory.

It is also little known that hundreds of thousands of Arab
squatters in 'Arab East Jerusalem' live on land still owned by the
Jewish National Fund. The JNF purchased hundreds of individual parcels
of land in and around Jerusalem during the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s. In
1948, on one of these parcels the UN built the Kalandia refugee camp. The Deheishe refugee camp south of Bethlehem was also built on JNF land.

In the 1920s and 30s Iraqi and Iranian Jews queued up to buy
parcels of JNF land; after the 1948 war, they were cut off from their
purchases when these came under Jordanian rule, as Gil Zohar explained
in his 2007 Jerusalem Post piece. In total 145,976 dunams (I dunam = 1,000 sq. m) of Jewish land is said to have come under Jordanian control. (Jewish property claims against Arab countries by Michael Fischbach, p 85).

During the 1920s and 30s the ‘Agudat HaDayarim’ Jewish Cooperative
Society was established in Jerusalem in order to create Jewish
neighbourhoods outside the Old City. The Society had over 210 members,
from all walks of life and ethnic backgrounds - including Persian, Iraqi
and Yemenite Jews. In 1928 the Aguda purchased 598 dunams of land on
the city outskirts in Abu Dis in order to build a ‘Garden Community’
(homes with agricultural plots). Although it acquired a legal title to
the area, the Arab revolts of 1929 and 1936-9 prevented the Aguda from
establishing the new community. The War of Independence resulted in the
Jewish-owned lands in Abu Dis coming under the control of the Jordanian
Custodian of Enemy Property.

Another 16,684.421 dunams of Jewish land in the rural West Bank -
including the Gush Etzion settlements, land between Nablus, Jenin and
Tulkarm, and in Bethlehem and Hebron - were seized by the Jordanians
after 1948.

Even before 1948, riots and massacres caused Jews of the centuries-old Yishuv to evacuate their homes in Hebron and parts of Jerusalem.

Before it fell to the Arab Legion in 1948, Jerusalem had a Jewish
majority. The first refugees from eastern Jerusalem were Jews from the
Shimon Hatzaddik quarter - the site of the tomb of Simon the High Priest.
The Old City of Jerusalem became 'judenrein' as thousands of Jews were
expelled, leaving their property behind. The Old City was ransacked and
some 58 synagogues were destroyed during the 19-year Jordanian
occupation. Jews were banned from their holiest places.

There is a respectable body of opinion which argues that most
Israeli settlements are legal. Even if Israel were to agree that the
Jewish settlements stigmatized by the EU are illegal under international
law, the proportion of land 'built on Arab land' in the West Bank
represents a tiny fraction of the Jewish-owned land abandoned or seized
as a matter of deliberate policy in Arab countries.

The issue of Jewish settlements has to be seen in the context of
the mass exchange of land and population between Jews and Arabs across
the entire region.

The status quo represents an exchange far more favourable to Arabs than to Jews. According to economist Sidney Zabludoff,
the Jewish refugees – 75 percent of whom resettled in Israel - lost
assets worth twice as much as those abandoned by Palestinian refugees.

On the macro-level, the World Organization of Jews from Arab Countries estimates that Jews living in Arab countries owned some 100,000 sq km of deeded property, equivalent to four or five times the size of Israel itself.

Many cities in the 'Arab' Middle East and North Africa had large
Jewish populations. Baghdad was a quarter Jewish. Within a generation,
the Jewish population of the Arab world will have been ‘cleansed’ out of
existence.

Evidently, private ownership of property does not equate to
sovereignty. But many people – the EU included - assume that areas
inhabited in Jerusalem and the ‘West Bank’ by a majority of Arabs -
regardless of whether they established that majority at the expense of
Jews - should naturally come under Arab sovereignty. Organisations like
J-Street and Yachad are willing to fight for Arab squatters’ rights; you would be hard-pressed to find any human rights group or NGO prepared to campaign for Jewish property rights.

The suggestion is never considered that the attacking parties in
the 1967 war - Syria and Jordan - should be made to forfeit territory as
the price for their aggression. No Arab state has been held to account
for ‘ethnically cleansing’ their innocent Jewish citizens whom they
branded, from1948 onwards, as ‘members of the minority of Palestine’.
Instead, the Arab states have pocketed the spoils. It goes without
saying that no Arab government has paid out any compensation for lost
Jewish property.Israel is expected to make all the concessions.

East Jerusalem was annexed to Israel; some Jews have recovered
their properties, and settlements predating 1948 have been
re-established since the ‘West Bank’ came under Israeli control.
But those Jews who purchased parcels of land in East Jerusalem and its
periphery have not been allowed to recover lands purchased from the JNF.

The reason is that these come under the jurisdiction of the 'Jordanian Custodian for Enemy Property' .

The irony is that the Sephardi and Mizrahi Jews among them are
screwed twice over: by the Arab states, who forced them to become
refugees and dispossessed them of their original dwellings in Arab
countries - be these mansions in Tahrir Square or rather more modest
abodes ; and by Israel, which, in compliance with international law,
will not, as a general rule, allow Jewish-owned lands beyond the Green
Line to revert to their original owners until a final
peace settlement is signed.

In all the discussion of ‘Jewish settlements’ the international
community has a decontextualised and distorted idea of just who has
dispossessed whom - and the Israeli government is not exactly helping to
enlighten them.

11 comments:

Anonymous
said...

I don't think we have made enough noise as the Arabs do.They get up and shout and we, the Jews, prefer the distinguished way!Recently I was told that the Jews go out and kill Arab children.How about that!sultana

Sultana: Jews cannot win for losing. When we do speak up, we stand accused of playing the victim card too often. But our biggest PR problem is a numbers game. We're a puny 14 million or so of the world's population, less than a 1/2 percent. Muslims around the world are at least 1.3 billion, and, regardless of their ethnicity or how badly they were treated by the Muslim conquerors who introduced Islam to lands far beyond "Arabia", they have been thoroughly intoctrinated to identify with "the Arabs".

OT:Has anyone noticed a New York Times article by Judy Rudoren implying that throwing stones at Jews is an exclusive Palestinian rite of passage ? As if they're the ones who have just invented it? As if throwing stones at Jews is the consequence of the sole occupation and has not been required of Muslim children for centuries everywhere in the MENA?

as a matter of fact, Prof Norman Stillman --who inter alia compiled an anthology of the Jewish experience in Arab lands-- wrote about a personal experience in this vein.While visiting his wife's family in Morocco, he was walking on a street and was casually stoned by an Arab kid, just for being a Jew. Norman, whom I met years ago, does look "Jewish."He reports that the kid threw the stone casually, without showing any special animosity. It was just a way of life.

See link:http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2013/08/05/culture-of-violence-a-palestinian-hobby-stone-throwing/

Yes, Eliyahu, that was my experience too growing up and that of many others'.

Of course it was done without any animosity. That's the point. The purpose of the exercise from the point of view of those who send them was to desensitize them at an early age to the humanity of Jews by eliminating feeling of one sort or the other forever.

Even today, some children will pick up a stone when seeing a Jew just by association. Like a conditioned reflex.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)